The Passion a television drama serial produced by the BBC and HBO Films in association with Deep Indigo Productions. It tells the story of the last week in the life of Jesus. The serial was first proposed by Peter Fincham in 2006, on the success of the contemporary-set Manchester Passion. Writer Frank Deasy and producer Nigel Stafford-Clark were inspired to make a drama that opened up the story beyond the "vacuum" it is often told in. They did this by expanding the roles of Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas, and exploring the politics of Judea at the time. Deasy and Stafford-Clark were aided by scholar Mark Goodacre, with whom they put together an extensive research manual about the topic.

The part of Jesus is played by Joseph Mawle, who researched the role by reading the Gospels and research papers. Other main roles were played by Paloma Baeza (Mary Magdalene), Ben Daniels (Caiaphas), James Nesbitt (Pilate), David Oyelowo (Joseph of Arimathea), and Penelope Wilton (Mary).

I recall when the miniseries came out in 2008 because Mark had some posts about it at his blog, but I wasn't able to see it then as it wasn't yet showing in the US. It's now at Netflix, I see, and I believe you can also see it on YouTube. One great thing about it was that Mary M was *not* erroneously depicted as a prostitute. The other thing that struck me was the crucifixion scene, in which Jesus was in an atypical posture (Why the BBC thinks Christ did not die this way).

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The Pope vs an article in Nature

Pope Francis has strongly criticized modern theories that consider people's gender identities to exist along a spectrum, saying such theories do not "recognize the order of creation." Speaking of gender theory in an interview in a new book released in Italy, the pope even compares such theories to genetic manipulation and nuclear weapons.

Gender theory is a broad term for an academic school of thought that considers how people learn to identify themselves sexually and how they may become typed into certain roles based on societal expectations ...

Of course I disagree with Pope Frances, and today I saw an article in Nature that shows just how mistaken the pope is in his love for JPII-style complementarianism. Here's a bit from the beginning of the article ...

[...] Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms ...

The depressing thing is that the pope and the Vatican use their misconceptions about gender to justify their unequal treatment of women and those LGBT.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Oliver Sacks

For those who aren't familiar with him, here's a bit about him from Wikipedia ...

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (born 9 July 1933) is an American-British neurologist, writer, and amateur chemist who is Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine .... Sacks is the author of numerous best-selling books, including several collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. His 1973 book Awakenings, an autobiographical account of his efforts to help victims of encephalitis lethargica regain proper neurological function, was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name in 1990 starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain were the subject of "Musical Minds", an episode of the PBS series Nova.

Jesus on retreat

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Thinking about contemporary retreats today and how different they mostly are from what Jesus experienced. A typical Ignatian (Jesuit) 30 day Spiritual Exercises retreat is often given at resorts where the cost can be $2,000+ for a 30 retreat (Eastern Point Retreat House) ...

As Jesuit Nathan Stone mentions in an article I just read about the Spiritual Exercises ...

Over time, the Exercises have been pushed back into “the monastery”. The Nineteenth century understood them as a silent ordeal for Jesuit novices, not really a spiritual journey at all, and not for anyone else. Contemporary thinking has made them a specialty, given by experts to an elite. In some venues, invitations are scarce. In others, cost filters out all but a small number.

The only retreat I've physically been on wasn't Christian but Zen, in Hawaii. It didn't cost much and there we retreatants shared bedrooms and slept on the floor, made our own meals together, did our own laundry, cleaned the retreat house and did yard work. I remember breakfasts all together, eating the fruit bowl with yogurt and peanuts that we had just prepared, sitting at a table outside under the trees ... yum :) Even that seems luxurious compared to the retreat Jesus made ....

Friday, February 20, 2015

The Château de Sully-sur-Loire

The picture on my France calendar yesterday was of the Château de Sully-sur-Loire ... The château was the seat of the Duke de Sully, Henri IV's minister Maximilien de Béthune (1560–1641), and the later dukes of Sully. It is a château-fort, a true castle, built to control one of the few sites where the Loire can be forded.

Here are some photos of the interior from Wikipedia Commons. The interior shots remind me a bit of the place where Ignatius of Loyola grew up.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

A movie for Lent

It's Lent. I don't like Lent. I don't see how short-term ritualized acts like giving up meat for a few days or praying the rosary over and over, or even "alms-giving", can be spiritually profitable .... if these kinds of things - not eating meat, helping others, personal prayer - are important, shouldn't they be a part of your everyday life?

So instead of suggesting some solemn acts for the few weeks of Lent, I'm going to mention something lighthearted instead - a movie I once saw that touches on giving stuff up ... 40 Days and 40 Nights ...

a 2002 romantic comedy film directed by Michael Lehmann, written by Rob Perez and starring Josh Hartnett, Shannyn Sossamon and Paulo Costanzo .... Matt Sullivan (Josh Hartnett) and his roommate, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo), are co-workers at a San Francisco dot-com company. Matt is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), and his obsession repeatedly causes him problems during attempted one-night stands. He confides his sexual problems to his brother, John (Adam Trese), who is training to become a Catholic priest. In an attempt to fix his problems, Matt vows to abstain from sexual stimulation, including masturbation, for the 40 days and 40 nights of Lent. John warns Matt that chastity is not easy; meanwhile, Ryan starts a popular office pool to bet on how long Matt can last.

Roger Ebert gave the movie 3 out of 4 stars. Here's the beginning of his review ...

Matt is weary of sex. Weary of himself as a sex partner. Weary of the way he behaves around women, weary of the way women make him behave, and weary of his treacherous ex-girl. So weary that he swears off sex for Lent in "40 Days and 40 Nights." On the scale of single guy sacrifice, this is harder than not drinking but easier than asking directions.

Matt (Josh Hartnett) is a nice guy who is disgusted by his predatory sexual nature--at the way his libido goes on autopilot when he sees an attractive woman. The breakup with Nicole (Vinessa Shaw) is the final straw. She loved him, dumped him, still excites him, and no wonder; as Bagel Man, who makes morning deliveries to the office, observes, "She's so hot you need one of those cardboard eclipse things just to look at her." Matt gets some support from his brother John (Adam Trese), who is studying to be a priest and offers advice which is more practical than theologically sound, but nobody else in Matt's life believes he can go 40 days without sex .... "40 Days and 40 Nights" was directed by Michael Lehmann, who has a sympathy for his characters that elevates the story above the level of a sexual sitcom. He uses humor as an instrument to examine human nature, just as he did in the wonderful, underrated "The Truth About Cats and Dogs."

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Jesus: the movie

- Jesus and his mom

Duke NT scholar Mark Goodacre has a new podcast, this one on the film Jesus as part of his ongoing series about Jesus in the movies. I was hoping he would review this film as it is my favorite Jesus movie, the first one I saw after becoming a Christian. The podcast is here - NT Pod 74: Jesus The Movie (1999). I don't want to give anything away, but it's a great review, quite in-depth, and Mark does make the comment that the movie is in many ways remarkable :)

- I once read a study - can't remember where now - that found it was conservative men, not liberal men, who were the most obsessed with kink, and it's my contention that Fifty Shades of Grey has more in common with the conservative sex classes of Christopher West and JPII's creepy Theology of the Body than it has with anything liberal. What made me think of this was an article I saw today by Joseph Heschmeyer at First Things on the Fifty Shades of Grey ...

[W]hat are fans of the Fifty Shades series seeking? One answer is that there’s a hunger that’s not being satisfied: Namely, for men who are unabashedly masculine, who aren’t afraid to take control, and to lead. That is, there’s a longing (even a lusting) for men who aren’t afraid of what’s classically been called “headship.” To this end, while Fifty Shades subverts Christian sexual morality, it subverts the modern crusade for “genderlessness” all the more ...

He is perhaps the ultimate human achievement: a sentient artificial life-form -- self-aware, self-determining, possessing a mind and body far surpassing that of his makers, and imbued with the potential to evolve beyond the scope of his programming. Created by one of the most brilliant and eccentric intellects the Federation has ever known, the android Data has always believed he was unique, the one true fulfillment of a dream to create children of the mind. But is he? Investigating the mysterious destruction of a new android created by Starfleet, Data and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise™ uncover startling secrets stretching back to the galaxy's dim past. That knowledge is coveted by beings who will stop at nothing to control it, and will force Data to redefine himself as he learns the hidden history of artificial intelligence.

Since my sister gave me a kindle as a gift, one of the happiest things about that has been that I can now read so many books that were unavailable to me because of my bad vision ....books that were not popular or profound enough to be made into audio CDs or large print. Star Trek books seem to mostly fall into that category. I used to read them when I was a teen and when I was diagnosed with the eye disease, the first thing I said to my sister was, "I'll never be able to read another Star Trek novel." Now I can, and I'm making up for all the lost time :)

When Take Me to Church was released in 2013, with Brendan Canty and Conal Thomson’s graphically angry protest video, Hozier’s hit song span off into a worldwide anthem for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
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Now another video interpretation of the Hozier song has appeared online, and it too is going viral. If there’s a political message to David LaChapelle’s film of Sergei Polunin dancing alone in an empty barn, it’s a deliberately oblique one. But Polunin, a Ukrainian dancer who is now working principally in Russia and who has struggled very publicly in the search for his professional and personal identity, brings a story of his own to Hozier’s song.

This solo is far from showing Polunin at his extraordinary best. Jade Hale-Christofi’s choreography is burdened with hackneyed, head-clutching emoting and, atmospheric though the venue is, it’s a constricted space. Yet LaChapelle’s filming creates its own striking chemistry with Polunin, portraying him nakedly, poignantly alone with himself. His numerous tattoos – usually covered with stage makeup – are proudly on display, his dancer’s tights are symbolically torn. And in the huge body-wracking shifts from floor-hugging crouches to airborne leaps, Polunin does seem to bring to his dancing the demons of his difficult life ...

Saturday, February 14, 2015

The Pope, gender equality, and the depressing irrelevance of facts

strongly criticized modern theories that consider people's gender identities to exist along a spectrum, saying such theories do not "recognize the order of creation." Speaking of gender theory in an interview in a new book released in Italy, the pope even compares such theories to genetic manipulation and nuclear weapons. Gender theory is a broad term for an academic school of thought that considers how people learn to identify themselves sexually and how they may become typed into certain roles based on societal expectations ...

It's really important to socially conservative Catholics like the Pope to retain the idea of ciomplementarianism, the view that men and women are ontologically different and have different and complementary abilities and roles (the Pope and others have opined that women have special qualities men don't and even have different souls than men) ... it's one of the ways they justify discriminating against women in the church.

But as another studies about the anti-vaccine movement and about climate change deniers has shown, when people have a big emotional investment in a certain belief, facts that contradict that belief will be ignored ... I Don’t Want to Be Right ...

[...] Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct.Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief.

But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur ...

a 1946 American spy thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains as three people whose lives become intimately entangled during an espionage operation .... Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate an organisation of Nazis who have moved to Brazil after World War II.

- The pope says people who don't want children are selfish. Aside from the weirdness of a man who doesn't want children telling other people who don't want children that they are selfish, I'd like to put to rest his wrongheaded notion that the earth needs more people .... Having Children Brings High Carbon Impact

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Hozier and the Catholic church

Reading that Irish musician Hozier performed his song, Take Me to Church at the Grammy Awards. I like him and had a post on him and this song about a year ago here. Here's a Grammy Pro interview with him in which he mentions what some of what he dislikes about the Catholic church: gender inequality, homophobia, original sin, etc. ...

And here's a bit from a more in depth interview from New York Magazine ...

"Take Me to Church" is a critique of oppressive institutions, with a woman or female pronoun used as a sort of savior.

"Take Me to Church" is essentially about sex, but it's a tongue-in-cheek attack at organizations that would … well, it's about sex and it's about humanity, and obviously sex and humanity are incredibly tied. Sexuality, and sexual orientation — regardless of orientation — is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation — that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love. Turning your back on the theoretical thing, something that's not tangible, and choosing to worship or love something that is tangible and real — something that can be experienced.

But it's not an attack on faith. Coming from Ireland, obviously, there's a bit of a cultural hangover from the influence of the church. You've got a lot of people walking around with a heavy weight in their hearts and a disappointment, and that shit carries from generation to generation. So the song is just about that — it's an assertion of self, reclaiming humanity back for something that is the most natural and worthwhile. Electing, in this case a female, to choose a love who is worth loving.

The video parallels that — it's a statement against state oppression and homophobia in Russia.

Absolutely, yes. It references the very organized attacks against LGBT youths that are carried out with impunity, without action from law enforcement. There are a lot of far-right guys who film these attacks. Because the song was always about sexuality and about organizations that would undermine humanity at its most natural, we thought that — in Ireland, the church doesn't really have that kind of strength that it did, but there will always be organizations that will, and there will always be organizations that try. Hopefully there won't be one day, but there are, and this is a pure example of that.

It's people carrying out terrible acts through the justification of far-right traditionalism, and also a long campaign to make homosexuality equivalent with things like pedophilia and bestiality, which is absolutely appalling. So that's what we wanted to show. The video wasn't overexaggerating anything. We just wanted to tell it how it is.

In case you haven't seen the Take Me to Church video mentioned in the interview ...

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Experience and the Spiritual Dimension

The Pope on hitting children

[...] Speaking about responsible fatherhood at a general audience on Wednesday, Francis recalled a meeting with a father who told him he hit his children when they misbehaved. “Once, in a marriage counseling session, I heard a father say ‘Sometimes I need to hit my children a bit, but never in the face, to avoid humiliating them.’” “That’s great,” added Francis, “he has a sense of dignity. He needs to punish, do the right thing, and move on.” ...

When I read the words ... ‘Sometimes I need to hit my children a bit, but never in the face, to avoid humiliating them.’ ... what comes to mind for me are the tactics of people who commit domestic violence on women and children, hurting them in places on their bodies where teachers and other people outside the family will not notice the signs of abuse. I can't believe Francis thought that avoiding hitting children in the face has anything to do with preserving their "dignity". Maybe this isn't surprising, though, given that not long ago the Pope mentioned that he would punch someone who dared to insult his mother.

One thing I recall from psych classes in college was that hitting children teaches them one thing - that might makes right. As a kid I was often hit by my mother and it was the beginning of the ruination of our relationship.

Friday, February 06, 2015

Obama and the Crusades

President Obama mentions how religion has been hijacked throughout history to be used as a weapon, with examples of the Crusades and the Inquisition. I think he was quite correct ....

But conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and the head of the Catholic League, were quick to criticize him and some to actually opine that the Crusades and Inquisition weren't really all that bad and were more a secular than religious thing. A BBC story states ...

Powerline Blog's John Hinderaker comes to their defence.

"There was nothing wrong, in principle, with the Crusades," he writes. "They were an appropriate (if belated and badly managed) response to the conquest of the Holy Land by Islam. Did marauding 11th century armies inevitably commit outrages? They certainly did. In fact, that still happens today. But the most unfortunate thing about the Crusades is that they failed."

- The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople by Eugene Delacroix

Oh really? I think the Christian victims of the Northern Crusades and the Christian victims of the Fourth Crusade and the Jewish victims of the German Crusade would be amazed to learn that the Crusades were all about saving the Holy Land from Islam. There really is no way to ethically whitewash the Crusades nor the Inquisition.

- Massacre of the Jews of Metz during the First Crusade by Auguste Migette

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Links

- So what's the significance of declaring Oscar Romero a martyr? Martyrs don't need to rack up two miracles in order to be made saints, which will make the process easier/quicker. His proposed sainthood is, of course, a political subject .... for the most part, the conservatives don't like him, the liberals do. I myself have mixed feelings about him and also about the whole sainthood thing in general, but anyway, here's a recent article on the subject - Vatican panel says Oscar Romero was a martyr

He often also wrote about religion - Adam And Eve Did Not Literally Exist. Period. - and of course he had an interesting perspective on society too - here's a video linked to at The Dish some time ago: a discussion between Andrew and Dan Savage at the New York Public Library ...

Monday, February 02, 2015

The church gets it wrong yet again

Remember the Pontifical Council for Culture, the author of that YouTube video that was laughed off the site? ...

[...] "You can't make this up," wrote columnist Phyllis Zagano, an academic at Hofstra University in New York. "The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture has posted a two-minute video of a sexy blonde woman inviting other women to crowdsource another video for its February meeting. "Aside from the obvious - sexy sell has long gone by the boards in developed nations and is totally unacceptable in predominantly Muslim countries - the fact of the matter is that highlighting a stereotypical spokeswoman is not the way to ask for women's input." .... Consuela Corradi, a sociologist who was one of 15 women to advise on the initiative, complained that criticism of the video was unfair. "If we had chosen an ugly woman, would that have changed the message? I don't think so," she told Associated Press.

Right, heaven forbid we should have to look at an ugly women :( Well, the Council is in the news again with an issues paper released ahead of the conference ... Pontifical council to consider challenges women face in society, church. In the paper, which aptly begins with a quote from complementarisnist Edith Stein, the Council criticizes what it considers secular society's negative treatment of women while totally ignoring the negative ways the church itself treats women, and in fact the Council opines that women are really really different than men (we have intuition!) and that women don't actually care at all about women's ordination. What a bunch of rubbish.

Listen to a podcast on sexism in the church with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the recent US ambassador for Religious Freedom the Rev. Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, The President of Union Theological Seminary, The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, and the one and only Sister Joan Chittister, from this article: Sexism: The Original Sin Of The Church (All Together Podcast). Here's a bit of the article ...

[...] Recently, Rev. Libby Lane was consecrated as Bishop of Stockport making her the first woman Bishop in the Church of England. The stain glass ceiling break-through only occurred after years of debate and still, at her consecration, a priest stood and objected. In Orthodox Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church and in some Protestant denominations, women are not allowed to serve as pastors or priests. Pope Francis, who has been so open on many issues, has slammed the door shut to any debate on women serving as priests.

Given that women surrounded Jesus during his ministry, were the last to stay with Jesus at the cross, and the first to see him resurrected; it appears clear that Jesus believed in the spiritual power and perception of women. So, why does the church not hold women in the same esteem as did Jesus, the founder and center of the faith?

To help him understand the continuing sexism in the Christian Church, Raushenbush spoke with four extraordinary women: the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the recent US ambassador for Religious Freedom the Rev. Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, The President of Union Theological Seminary, The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, and the one and only Sister Joan Chittister ....

[...] While Jesus is adamantly opposed to divorce, he never once speaks in favor of marriage. He never celebrates a wedding (from a historian’s perspective, facilitating drunkenness at the Wedding at Cana is less evidence of Jesus’s support of marriage than of his desire to keep the party going) and describes heaven as a place where marriage no longer exists. It’s called heaven for a reason. In Mark 10:29-30, and with no mention of child support, Jesus promises the disciples that anyone who leaves “brother or sister or father or mother or children” for his sake would be rewarded in the age to come. And he’s not just a home wrecker in theory; tradition maintains that some of Jesus’s disciples were married, but their wives are not mentioned in the Gospels. Apparently the apostles left their families to go on a three-year fishing trip ..... In the first two centuries of the Common Era the real advocates for “traditional marriage” were the pagan Romans. The Christian tendency to reject marriage was one point of contention between the imperial authorities and the fledgling religion ...

For those who are interested, here's my past post in which Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, writes on what Jesus thought about marriage and divorce ... Jesus on marriage & divorce